Primitive society

“ If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts. ”

“ Of course, if we have to do with a primitive society on the down-grade—and very few that have been "civilizaded," as John Stuart Mill terms it, at the hands of the white man are not on the down-grade—its disorganized and debased custom no longer serves a vital function. But a healthy society is bound, in a wholesale way, to have a healthy custom. ”

“ While the classification of concepts, the types of association, and the resistance to change of automatic acts, developed unconsciously, many of the secondary explanations are due to conscious reasoning.
I will give still another example of a form of association characteristic of primitive society. In modern society, social organization, including the grouping of families, is essentially based on blood-relationship and on the social functions performed by each individual. ”

“ The sources to which scientific men have gone in their attempts to reconstruct that primitive mentality are very various. Recently the science of psycho-analysis, which analyzes the way in which the egotistic and passionate impulses of the child are restrained, suppressed, modified or overlaid, to adapt them to the needs of social life, seems to have thrown a considerable amount of light upon the history of primitive society ”

“ Except in so far as the Church concerns itself with birth, marriage, and death, there is no connection between social organization and religious belief. These conditions are quite different in primitive society, where we find an inextricable association of ideas and customs relating to society and to religion. As in art form tends to associate itself with ideas entirely foreign to it, so the social unit tends to associate itself with various impressions of nature, 236particularly with the divisions of the animal world. ”

“ Unconscious and conscious imitation are factors influencing civilized society, not less than primitive society, as has been shown by G. Tarde, who has proved that primitive man, and civilized man as well, imitates not such actions only as are useful, and for the imitation of which logical causes may be given, but also others for the adoption or preservation of which no logical reason can be assigned. ”

“ When primitive man began to develop the rudiments of society (the group, or the herd) he did so mainly for self-preservation. In the struggle for existence coordinated numbers gave him a better chance; and giving him a better chance of life, they gave him also a better chance of self-development and self enjoyment. But into that early society man brought not only his social instincts but his predatory instincts as well. ”

“ I suppose the primitive man is one who owes more to nature than to the forces of civilization. What we seek in him are the primal and original traits, unmixed with the sophistications of society, and unimpaired by the refinements of an artificial culture. ”

“ The institutions of primitive man, from which sociology starts, are as much within the domain of folk-lore as his myths. Indeed the myths and legends of a people are frequently inexplicable apart from its laws and ceremonies. But sociology has mainly to do with history; it may be said to be a forward-looking, while folk-lore is a backward-looking, science. Sociology deals with the social environment and organisation of men, tracing these from their early forms along the lines of their development, and striving from every indication to divine the future of our species. ”

“ Instead of lying back at the origin of society it lies yet a great way in the future, when the present disposition of every one to tell his neighbors how they ought to live shall have been overcome. Probably the primitive savage was happy according to his standards; but if even it were true that primitive men had and enjoyed some boon of nature, how can it be imagined that a civilized society could get happiness for its members according to the standards of civilized society, while re-establishing any of the facts and conditions of primitive savage life? ”

“ They are civilized men, and bear civil society in their own life. But these are no representatives of the primitive man in the alleged state of nature. These primitive men have no experience, no knowledge, no conception even of civilized life, or of any state superior to that in which they have thus far lived. ”

“ By long experience of the course of human society, the principle of development in culture has become so ingrained in our philosophy that ethnologists, of whatever school, hardly doubt but that, whether by progress or degradation, savagery and civilization are connected as lower and higher stages of one formation. ”

“ This is the reason why, in all stages of culture, customary actions are made the subject of secondary explanations that have nothing to do with their historical origin, but which are inferences based upon the general knowledge possessed by the people. 226I think the existence of such secondary interpretations of customary actions is one of the most important anthropological phenomena, and we have seen that it is hardly less common in our own society than in more primitive societies. It is a common observation that we desire or act first, and then try to justify our desires and our actions. ”

“ The people can only be considered as primitive humanity in so far as from it as the stars from the nebulae, were separated, by slow and unappreciable segmentation, at first, the individuals, who by more or less affinity of character, formed the ancient castes, of which the so-called social classes are the remains to-day. ”

“ The degradation-theory would expect savages to hold beliefs and customs intelligible as broken-down relics of former higher civilization. The development-theory would expect civilized men to keep up beliefs and customs which have their reasonable meaning in less cultured states of society. ”

“ Now it deserves to be remarked that these characteristics are in no sense primitive. In social organisation the distinguishing feature of the Heroic Age is in the nature of a revolt or emancipation from those tribal obligations and ideas by which the society of primitive peoples is everywhere governed. ”

“ These virtues, however, are not unfrequently to be found among primitive peoples, and are probably in the main due to the simpler structure of society. A more developed and consequently more complicated social order leads to the decline of many of the natural virtues of humanity. ”

“ Nutt must stand over for want of space, I would just observe that I cannot agree with him that folk-lore should be defined as dealing with primitive man without some explanation as to how it so deals. Surely folk-lore deals primarily with the survival of primitive customs and beliefs among civilized races, and is comparable with, not identical with, the living primitive customs and beliefs of savage races. ”

“ Why some of our planets are so far down the ladder of social evolution they live under [pg 027] primitive tribal society; their leaders, their wise men and witch-doctors, whatever you call them, are scared someone will come along and establish chattel slavery. ”

“ The other liability to which the infancy of society is exposed has prevented or arrested the progress of far the greater part of mankind. The rigidity of primitive law, arising chiefly from its earlier association and identification with religion, has chained down the mass of the human race to those views of life and conduct which they entertained at the time when their usages were first consolidated into a systematic form. ”

“ The age, properly called primitive, falls, in our judgment, within the sphere of ethnology, of prehistoric times, and of anthropology. The hatchet, the dagger, or the arrow of primitive man, and his physical constitution, as it may be studied in his skeletons and skulls, do not form the subject-matter of folk-lore, nor do the acts and conceptions of the child belong to it either. ”

“ We found them quite common in primitive life, and noticed the 250great variety of ideas and activities that were thus brought into contact so as to produce a number of peculiar concepts and activities. Other peculiar associations are not due to strong emotional causes, but to all of them is common the tendency of taking on rationalistic explanations of varied character. The change from primitive to civilized society includes a lessening of the number of the emotional associations, and an improvement of the traditional material that enters into our habitual mental operations. ”

“ Among evidence aiding us to trace the course which the civilization of the world has actually followed, is that great class of facts to denote which I have found it convenient to introduce the term ‘survivals.’ These are processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved. ”

“ Understand?”
“By what right, may I ask?” murmured Winthrope.
“Right!” answered Blake. “That hasn’t anything to do with the question–it’s might. Back in civilized parts, your little crowd has the drop on my big crowd, and runs things to suit themselves. But here we’ve sort of reverted to primitive society. This happens to be the Club Age, and I’m the Man with the Big Stick. See?”
“I myself sympathize with the lower classes, 91 Mr. Blake. Above all, I think it barbarous the way they punish one who is forced by circumstances to appropriate part of the ill-gotten gains of the rich upstarts. ”

“ One of the striking forms of social organization which occurs in many regions wide apart is what we call “totemism,”—a form of society in which certain social groups consider themselves as related in a supernatural way to a certain species of animals or to a certain class of objects. ”

“ These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of Nature, refracted from their straight line. Indeed, in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: ”

“ Therefore the fundamental difficulty for the rise of primitive people—namely, that an individual who has risen to the level of the higher civilization is still looked upon as belonging to an inferior race—did not prevail. ”

“ Ages before the time which the limitations of our knowledge force us to speak of as the dawn of history, man had reached a high stage of development. As a social being, he had developed all the elements of a primitive civilization. If, for convenience of classification, we speak of his state as savage, or barbaric, we use terms which, after all, are relative, and which do not shut off our primitive ancestors from a tolerably close association with our own ideals. ”

“ Besides, does not the history of the development of civilization itself show existing in man the preponderant force of an eternal tendency to metamorphosis, to innovation, and to change? Fixedness of thoughts and immobility of habits were, it is true, the law of primitive peoples, as they still are of savage tribes; but then there is nothing to show that this is owing to heredity. ”

“ This peculiarity of association is also another expression of the conservatism of primitive culture and the changeability of many features of our civilization. We tried to show that the resistance to change is largely due to emotional sources, and that in primitive culture emotional 240associations are the prevailing type: hence resistance against the new. In our civilization, on the other hand, many actions are performed merely as means to a rational end. ”

“ The basis of this theoretical contradiction, just as the practical antagonism in social life, lies in the unequal development of the various classes of humanity, in the relations between the dominant and subservient races and classes, in the division of material and intellectual labor, and in the acquisitions resulting from this division. This inequality of development, advancing with the progress of civilization, was the rock upon which ancient society foundered. ”

“ Would the witness be kind enough to say whether those special characteristics of the manlier variety of wild folk which have given the word "savagery" its unfavourable sense, namely, their bloodthirstiness and indiscriminate cruelty, contain, or do not contain, the germ and promise of that stern yet disciplined mood in which the best of civilized men may be expected to fight against injustice and oppression?
The answer of the anthropologist would, surely, be that the savagery of the primitive warrior is the accident, not the essence, of his fighting quality. ”

“ In all cases in which a material reduction in numbers occurs in a thinly settled area, the economic life, as well as the social structure, is almost completely destroyed.
In addition to this, it may be said that the contrast between the culture represented by the modern white and that of primitive man is far more fundamental than that between the ancients and the people with whom they came in contact. ”